For decades, electronic data interchange (EDI) has been a cornerstone of B2B transactions, allowing companies to exchange business documents with trading partners efficiently. However, many organizations still struggle with rigid, outdated, and fragmented EDI solutions that limit scalability, visibility, and control.

Whether you’re using a fully managed EDI service, a traditional iPaaS, or a standalone EDI solution, each approach has trade-offs that create operational bottlenecks and drive up costs. Celigo B2B Manager eliminates these trade-offs, offering a truly modern, self-service EDI solution that delivers efficiency, control, visibility, and cost savings.

Why traditional EDI solutions fall short

Businesses commonly rely on one of three types of EDI solutions—each with distinct challenges:

1. Fully managed EDI services: Outsourcing EDI to a third-party provider removes day-to-day management burdens, but comes at a high cost.
   • Rising transaction fees from transaction-based pricing eat into margins as order volumes grow.
   • A lack of visibility and control over EDI transactions hurts trading partner relationships and leads to potential compliance issues and chargebacks.
2. Traditional iPaaS solutions: These legacy platforms are known for their complexity in building and managing EDI.
   • Traditional iPaaS solutions require significant developer effort to build and maintain EDI integrations.
   • Scalability and agility are limited due to resource constraints and complex configurations.
   • Resource dependency translates into high costs.
3. Incomplete standalone EDI solutions: Many standalone EDI solutions with prebuilt trading partner integrations fall into this category.
   • These solutions lack end-to-end automation capabilities between trading partners and an enterprise system, such as an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, requiring multiple tools to manage trading partners, EDI transactions, and ERP integrations.
   • Fragmented systems increase operational complexity and force IT teams to manage multiple vendors.
   • Businesses end up spending more on software, implementation, and maintenance.

How Celigo B2B Manager modernizes EDI management

Unlike traditional approaches, Celigo’s EDI solution, B2B Manager, delivers a complete, simplified self-service EDI experience, empowering IT teams to efficiently manage, monitor, and scale their B2B integrations—without the typical complexity or high costs. Designed to adapt to business needs, the underlying Celigo platform offers a scalable infrastructure to support growth.

Celigo B2B Manager provides:

1. Unified integration platform for API and EDI: Celigo customers can centrally manage both EDI-based and API-based B2B trading, as well as application-to-application integrations on a single platform, ensuring all their integration needs are met without the hassle of managing multiple systems.
2. Streamlined trading partner integration: B2B Manager accelerates the implementation of new trading partners with prebuilt connectors, centralized EDI profiles, EDI trading documents built to meet partner requirements, and industry-best ERP integration templates, reducing the barrier to rapid business expansion and revenue growth.
3. Enhanced visibility and control: Celigo streamlines B2B management with end-to-end automation on a single platform while providing full visibility into transactions via a centralized B2B dashboard. Users can identify errors, ensure compliance through validation, and have the ability to self-service, manage, troubleshoot, and customize integrations.
4. Lower costs: B2B Manager helps achieve lower total cost of ownership compared to traditional EDI providers with simplified EDI management, a transparent and predictable pricing model, and reduced EDI chargebacks.
5. Scaling of IT/EDI resources: Celigo supports business growth without the need for extensive IT resources. Customers can enjoy the flexibility to efficiently build, manage, and monitor end-to-end EDI integrations in-house or through a Celigo implementation partner.

Celigo B2B Manager provides a unique combination of comprehensive integration capabilities, ease of use, and scalability. Unlike traditional EDI solutions that are costly and time-consuming to implement, this solution offers a modern, efficient, and cost-effective solution tailored to the needs of growing manufacturing, wholesale, and distribution companies.

The future of EDI: A modern, scalable approach

For businesses looking to move beyond the limitations of fully managed services, outdated iPaaS solutions, and fragmented EDI tools, Celigo B2B Manager offers the best of all worlds: scalability, efficiency, visibility, and control—all in a single platform.

Learn more about how Celigo B2B Manager can help your business modernize EDI and B2B integrations. Schedule a demo today.

Dive deeper into how Celigo B2B Manager can transform your operations. Check out our ebook, “The definitive guide to modernizing EDI.”